


Cold Hands, Warm Heart

by blue_morning



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canon Divergent, Christmas Fluff, Fluff, Knitting, M/M, Pining, SPN Holiday Mixtape
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-10
Updated: 2016-12-10
Packaged: 2018-09-07 16:20:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8807659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blue_morning/pseuds/blue_morning
Summary: The first package arrives in May. Dean finds it sitting on the map table next to a box from a rare-book dealer in Brooklyn and another from a New Orleans herbalist. It’s small and misshapen, wrapped in brown paper cut from a grocery store bag and taped furiously. Nobody’s getting into that package without a pocketknife or an angel blade. Dean recognizes the bold angular letters of Cas’s handwriting — it’s addressed to Dean and the postmark is Charlotte, North Carolina.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was inspired by a Christmas song I heard for the first time last year. [Mittens](https://youtu.be/YfFLcTdaUTs) by Carly Rae Jepsen.
> 
> The SPN Holiday Mixtape was my very first fic challenge and I had so much fun! Thank you to [museaway](http://archiveofourown.org/users/museaway/pseuds/museaway), [RipUpTheEnding](http://archiveofourown.org/users/RipUpTheEnding/pseuds/RipUpTheEnding), pomegranatedaffodil, and [teacass](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Fushigi/pseuds/teacass) for making it so seamless and easy.
> 
> Many thanks to [Speary](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Speary/pseuds/Speary) and [ThePamelaOracle](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ThePamelaOracle/pseuds/ThePamelaOracle) for their thoughtful betas.
> 
> Merry Christmas, everyone!

The first package arrives in May. Dean finds it sitting on the map table next to a box from a rare-book dealer in Brooklyn and another from a New Orleans herbalist. It’s small and misshapen, wrapped in brown paper cut from a grocery store bag and taped furiously. Nobody’s getting into that package without a pocketknife or an angel blade. Dean recognizes the bold angular letters of Cas’s handwriting — it’s addressed to Dean and the postmark is Charlotte, North Carolina. 

The next morning he’s sitting in the bunker's kitchen with a coffee and the package on the table in front of him when Sam comes in. He snags a mug, pours himself a coffee, and looks over at Dean.

“Are you going to open it sometime this year?” he says. “I picked up the mail yesterday and you’ve been staring at it pretty much nonstop since then.”

Dean gives him a pointed look and takes another sip. Sam sighs and heads for the library. Dean can hear him rolling his eyes. It’s not that Dean doesn’t want to open the package, it’s that he’s afraid there’s a note. He’s hoping for a note, but he’s afraid of what it’ll say. And what it won’t.

He pulls the package across the table. Shredding the paper around the tape, he pulls it off and finds four square knit...things. They’re slightly smaller than washcloths and each has a small loop stitched to one corner. They’re olive green and made of some cottony kind of yarn.

“What the fuck, Cas?” Dean murmurs to himself, picking one up. A folded note flutters from between the squares (potholders?) and lands on the table. Dean sighs and unfolds it.

 

_Hello Dean,_

_I hope you and Sam are well._

_I don’t want you to worry about me. I have a job and a place to live. I make sandwiches at the grocery store Marnie’s uncle Sal owns. I rent a room in her house and she taught me to knit._

_Making things makes me happy. I like knitting. Once you get the rhythm, it’s like meditating in a way. I made you some dishcloths._

_I’m not ready to come back yet._

**************

Cas had left in February. 

Settling into the bunker after the Fall had been harder for him than Dean expected. Cas was human now, or the next thing to it, and he’d changed, alternating between manic bursts of interest in new things and periods of quiet, drifting through the bunker like a ghost. He seemed diminished, as if the grace he’d lost had physical bulk.

So Dean worried, and made plans. He practiced with Cas in the bunker’s gun range, sparred with him in the bunker’s gym. Brought Cas with them on hunts. In late January, they’d gone down to Louisiana after a nest of vamps that had been preying on people at a crossroads bar in Plaquemines Parish. Cas had killed two himself, and Dean had hoped it would help lift him out of his funk, help him feel useful. 

But two weeks later, a hunt went bad. They’d been up in Minnesota, tracking a werewolf. They’d searched through a frigid, derelict farmhouse after sundown, the fog from their breath hanging heavy in the beams of their flashlights. Dean and Cas had taken the ground floor while Sam headed into the cellar. Cas had seen a sudden movement outside the window, but before he could say anything, the werewolf dove through in a shower of glass. She lunged at Dean, clawing his thigh. Cas froze for a long second and then fired at her and missed. Sam pounded up the stairs and shot her dead. They wrapped a flannel shirt around the wound and drove slowly back to the motel. Cas had refused then and there to go on any more hunts.

“I could get you killed, Dean,” he’d said, miserable, smoothing the bandage and taping it down over the injury that Sam had just sutured closed on the motel room bed. Dean had tipped his head back and washed down two painkillers with the rest of the whiskey in his glass.

“Don’t be stupid, Cas. It turned out OK. I’m fine. Sam got her. You’ll get better at it.” 

“Sam had to save both of us back there. No. I’m not putting either of you in further danger.” 

And that had been that. 

One morning at the end of February, Dean got up and found a letter on the kitchen table.

 

_Dean,_

_I thought I would be helpful to you and Sam, even without my grace. But I’m not. I’m not a hunter. I’m not an angel. I don’t know what I am now._

_I’m going away. Not forever, but for a while. I need to figure out what I am, what I can do, how I can be useful, how I can fit in here now that Heaven is no longer an option for me._

_Please, just give me some time._

 

“SAM,” Dean yelled, heading down the hallway to Cas’s room, stopping sharply at seeing the laundry baskets where Cas had stored his clothes half empty, the duffle that usually hung from the doorknob of the closet door, gone. An empty space instead of Cas’s Lincoln in the garage.

Sam had been infuriatingly calm, making Dean sit down and eat breakfast.

“Cas is a grown man, Dean.”

“He’s not. He’s not himself —”

“Dean.” Sam had looked at him, “He’s thousands of years old, he’s survived Purgatory and Leviathans. He can look after himself for a while. Even without grace. You’ve taught him a lot.” Dean had grabbed his cell. Cas’s phone was not showing on the tracking app.

“Dammit Cas.” He’d phoned Cas, and the call had gone to voicemail. “Cas, get back here right now. You’re being stupid.” 

Sam had rolled his eyes, “Yeah, like that’s going to work.” 

The next message was less angry and pointed out the logistical problems with Cas’s plan. The third was pleading. 

The calls were not returned.

*************

After the dishcloths arrive, Dean shifts into overdrive, Googling grocery stores/Italian grocery stores/groceterias in Charlotte, cross-referencing with the name Sal, calling other hunters who might know Charlotte well enough to pinpoint the place. He has a list of thirteen possibles when Sam talks him out of hitting the road for North Carolina. A flurry of livestock mutilations around Las Cruces, New Mexico needs checking out. Dean grudgingly agrees and it takes them a week to kill the chupacabra, a week Sam also spends convincing Dean to leave Cas be. 

Back at the bunker, Dean is feeling Cas’s absence like an itch under his skin. He’s not there in the kitchen when Dean makes coffee in the morning. His place on the couch is empty when Dean and Sam sit down to watch the hockey playoffs, and Dean misses the stream of questions that he always gets when he watches sports with Cas ( _Why do they call that one particular thing icing? Everything in the game happens on the ice._ ) For a place that Cas has only lived in for a few short months, the bunker seems incredibly Cas-less now that he’s gone.

The next package arrives halfway through June. The postmark says Rochester, New York, and it’s much bigger than the last one. It’s an afghan this time, a large rectangle knit from some nubbly maroon yarn. 

 

_Hello Dean,_

_I know it’s always cold in the bunker, even in summer, and this is so you won’t have to keep carrying the duvet from your bed into the den when you want to watch tv. (You should watch Orphan Black, I think you’d like it.)_

_I’ve been working in a hardware store. It’s not far from Lake Ontario. The lake is so big that it seems like an ocean. The wind that comes off the lake when I stand on the dunes makes me feel like I can still fly. I miss that more than I thought I would._

_I’m not ready to come back yet._

 

Dean wraps himself in the afghan while he lies on the couch watching Orphan Black and flips Sam off when Sam smiles at him knowingly. And if Sam notices that one of the dishcloths is missing from the kitchen, he doesn’t mention it. Dean wakes that night with tears on his cheeks from a dream he can’t quite remember. Just the faint echoes of conversations, the feeling of loss, and blue, blue eyes.

July comes and goes without anything from Cas, and the bunker is welcome respite from the heat. The high drone of cicadas and unrelenting sun are the common denominators in the hunts Dean and Sam go on across the midwest. Two vengeful spirits and a small pack of ghouls are dispatched with relative ease in North Dakota and Iowa. 

They spend another hot summer week in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan looking for a wendigo, but they don’t find it. They spend time drinking beer around a campfire outside their rented cabin on a dirt road in the forest off a two-lane highway. Sam buys them swim trunks at Walmart and dares Dean into braving the heart-stoppingly cold water of Lake Superior. They whoop and splash each other before scrambling out to sun themselves on the rocks, teeth chattering as they lie back and let the heat stored in lichen-covered granite leach the lake cold from their skin. Dean enjoys himself for the first time in weeks, until thoughts of Cas intrude like clouds across the sun.

August arrives and Dean feels Cas’s absence like a toothache, dull and painful. Sam comes back from a mail run empty-handed.

“Fuck it, Sammy. We shoulda done more to make him feel welcome here.”

“Dean, he knows he’s welcome here. Just give—”

“ ‘Give him some time’? It’s been months, Sam. Months. Christ, he’s off on some hippy quest finding himself. It’s like a bad movie.” Dean stomps off to his bedroom.

He’s having trouble sleeping. He thinks of Cas constantly: bed-headed and monosyllabic, hunched over his morning coffee; curled up on the other end of the couch reading while Dean watches TV; blue eyes catching his in the rear-view mirror on long drives. A bottle of Jack takes up residence on Dean’s bedside table. He dreams of running through a dark and empty house searching for someone. For Cas, he realizes. It occurs to him slowly that it’s his heart that’s hurting at Cas’s absence.

Scarves show up in September. One for him and one for Sam. Sam’s is cream coloured and long enough for Dr. Who. Dean’s is moss green and plain and very soft. He tries it on and finds himself rubbing it against his cheek. He stops before Sam can catch him doing it. 

 

_Hello Dean,_

_I’m still in Rochester. I can’t seem to stop knitting. It’s much like gardening, I think. There’s pleasure in creating that isn’t there, or shouldn’t be there, in destruction._

_I know it’s early for scarves, but winter is coming and I know you don’t have one. You can be very stubborn sometimes, and though you say you don’t feel the cold, I know you do. You didn’t even wear gloves last winter outside and though you denied it, I know you regretted it._

_I’m not ready to come home yet._

 

Dean smiles as a memory surfaces. 

************

Back in early January, he and Cas had headed outside to clear the snow away from the garage doors. It had snowed all day, wet and heavy. The thick clouds that had brought the snow were gone and the night was clear and still. Stars reappeared — Orion and Gemini splayed across the indigo sky. Their shovels scraping against the hard driveway beneath the snow made the only sound. 

Cas had bundled up in an army-surplus parka and some canvas work gloves he’d found in the garage. Dean had a couple layers of flannel on under a jacket that was ill-suited to the cold, and no gloves. He stopped shoveling to blow on his hands and stick them in his pockets for a minute.

Cas kept shoveling, his back turned to Dean. Dean leaned over stealthily and packed a handful of snow into a ball. Grinning, he lobbed it overhand, and it hit the back of Cas’s head, crumbling and sending snow down the back of his jacket collar. Cas spun around.

“Dean!”

Dean bent over, shaking with laughter at the outrage on Cas’s face. Cas looked murderously back, grabbing the hem at the back of his jacket, pulling it away from his body and shaking it to dislodge the snow.

“Dude, your face --” Dean wheezed. Cas stuck his shovel into the snowbank on the edge of the driveway and bent to pick up some snow himself.

“No, Cas. _No_.” Dean tried to look serious and stern. “I was just playing around.”

“I know that, Dean.”

“Well, we’re, uh, pretty well done here, we can go inside now.” Dean backed away as nonchalantly as he could.

“Oh, we’re not done yet.” Cas lifted an eyebrow and advanced on Dean, who attempted to dodge the bullet he knew was coming, making noises that _in no way_ were giggles.

A snowball hit Dean on the side of the head.

“Oh, it is _on_ ,” he said, and scooped up some more ammunition. Cas ducked behind one of the trees lining the driveway and stepped out only long enough to launch another snowball at Dean, laughing, his cheeks red and eyes sparkling in the light spilling from floodlight on the garage wall.

Abandoning all attempts at stealth, Dean charged Cas and tackled him into the snow, landing on top of him and mercilessly washing his face with a handful of snow.

“Dean, stop!” Cas twisted underneath him, spitting out snow and laughing at the same time. Dean was suddenly transfixed, staring down at Cas, unable to drag his gaze away from Cas’s eyes. Cas fell silent, looking up at Dean. Dean swallowed and suddenly it was too much. He jumped up and made a show of brushing the snow off his clothes with his hands. Cas got up slowly and stood, watching him. 

Dean stopped, What the hell was wrong with him? He was distracted from these thoughts by his hands, so cold they were burning. He looked down at them, pale in the floodlight and flexed them, gasping slightly. Cas was immediately by his side.

“Dean, your hands…” Cas slipped his gloves off and grabbed Dean’s hands, hissing at how cold they were.

“Hey, no big deal. I’m fine, Cas. Cold hands, warm heart.” It was out before Dean could stop himself. An automatic response. Cas tilted his head and looked up at Dean.

“Something my mom used to say. Well, according to my dad.” They’d stood there for a moment like that, Cas holding Dean’s hands. Dean wondered why he didn’t want to pull them away, to stuff them in his pockets, to move away from Cas. Why he wanted to pull Cas closer. 

Cas had said, “We should go in. You’re going to get frostbite.”

************

Huh. He hasn’t thought about that night in forever. Maybe he’s felt this way about Cas for longer than he’s realized. He’s always shied away from the warm glow that he feels in his chest whenever Cas is near. He’s never wanted to examine it closely, to think about what it means. Maybe he’s felt something for Cas for months (for years even, if he’s honest with himself.) 

It’s not about missing Cas’s chatter in the silences that Sam can’t fill, it’s not about missing eating together in the bunker’s kitchen, it’s not missing someone to banter with about music while packing salt rounds. It’s all these and none of them. It’s missing _Cas_. It’s wanting his physical presence, his smile, the solid heat of his arm pressed against Dean’s in a diner booth.

Dean grabs the note again, something that was niggling at him coming clear in his brain. The other notes said, ‘I’m not ready to come back yet.’ This last note said ‘I’m not ready to come home yet.’ _Home_. Dean holds on hard to the small seed of hope that one word gives him.

October is beautiful, Indian summer lingering through the month. Sam and Dean drive through Sioux Falls on their way back from a hunt in Sheridan, Wyoming, and spend a weekend with Jody. They leave, laden with leftovers and an invite for Thanksgiving that they later refuse but counter with a Christmas invite to the bunker. 

November cools off and trails into December. The snow flies early, and by the week before Christmas there’s a thick layer on the ground. 

Dean returns home one evening from a shopping trip to Kansas City with packages that he hides in his room and bags from Home Depot filled with Christmas decorations and supplies to fix things around the bunker. He walks into the den to find Sam wrestling with a six-foot spruce and about 100 miles of Christmas tree lights. 

“A little help, Dean?”

Dean grins, “Nah, you’re doing fine.” He puts the boxes of ornaments he’s carrying down on the couch. “Besides, I’m going back outside. The floodlight’s burned out over the garage. I want to change it before Jody shows up. If she leaves after her shift tomorrow she won’t be here ‘til after dark.”

“Dean!”

He can hear Sam cursing behind him, but he’s already out of the den and through the door from the bunker to the garage. He gets the ladder down from the hook on the garage wall, opens the big garage door and puts the ladder outside before going back in for the box of lightbulbs and a screwdriver. It’s snowing again. He’s up on the ladder screwing the cover of the light back on when he hears a car turn off the road and into the driveway. 

Dean climbs down the ladder, hands cold and stiff from the screwdriver and the rungs of the aluminum ladder. He stops and watches the headlights coming up the drive. _Jody’s not supposed to be here ‘til tomorrow_ , he thinks. _Must have bailed early and hit the road_. The car gets closer. It’s not Jody’s Jeep. It’s Cas’s Lincoln.

He stands there, hands in the pockets of his light jacket, and waits. The car pulls up and parks, catching Dean in the headlights. The engine shuts off and Cas slowly gets out and stands, the open door in front of him like a shield. He’s wearing his trench coat over a hoodie and jeans. Snow spirals down and lands in his hair.

“Hello Dean.”

Dean can barely hear with his pulse pounding in his ears. His mouth is dry. He can’t move. He can only stare.

“Cas —” 

A thousand emotions are swirling around inside him. He wants to be aloof, to school his features to indifference, to say ‘So, you’re back. Sticking around this time?’ He wants to hurt Cas, to punish him for making Dean miserable. He wants to grab Cas and hold him close. He wants to kiss him. He wants too many things all at the same time, and so he does nothing. He stands there and lets Cas make the next move.

Cas closes the car door and walks towards him. _He looks good_ , Dean thinks, healthy, not tired or pale, just a little road-worn, a couple of days’ stubble on his cheeks, hair uncombed.

“Dean, I’m sorry.” He stops a few feet away. _Well look at that. He’s finally figured out personal space_. “It took much longer than I’d planned.”

“Longer to do what, Cas?”

“To learn how to be human. To learn that I can live on my own, that I can live without you.”

Dean’s heart hurts.

“So, what, you’ve come to say goodbye?” His voice is strained and harsh. Cas looks puzzled and then alarmed. Words tumble out in a rush.

“ _No!_ No, I’ve come back. It took a long time, but now I know that I don’t need to depend on you — you and Sam — that I can be on my own and survive. That if I stay, it’s because I want to. Not because I have to. Not because I can’t take care of myself. I know I want to be here, Dean. Whether I can help or not. I want this to be my home. If I can stay.” He drops his eyes from Dean’s and looks down at his feet. ”With you.”

The relief that rushes through Dean leaves him weak. And despite the snow still falling around them, he feels a warmth blooming in his chest.

“It’s always been your home, Cas. I want you to stay.” Dean can’t help the smile that’s spreading over his face, “with me.” _You’re my family, you’re my home_ , it’s a refrain in his heart.

Cas looks at Dean’s hands, now out of his pockets, cold and pale.

“Wait here. I made something for you — a Christmas present.” Before Dean can protest, Cas is back at the car, digging around on the passenger side. He comes back a minute later, carrying something. Mittens, it turns out. Large, warm-looking red mittens.

Dean stands there bemusedly as Cas carefully fits them over his hands. He looks up at Dean, snowflakes caught on eyelashes over endlessly deep blue eyes. Dean is drowning in them.

“Is that better?”

“Sure Cas, they’re great. Thank you. My hands feel better already. Merry Christmas.” He can’t look away.

Cas stares back. His brow furrows a bit as he considers something.

“If your hands aren’t cold anymore, is your heart still warm?”

Dean steps close and cradles Cas’s face in his hands, mittens dragging against the stubble on his cheeks. Cas doesn’t move away. In fact, he sways closer.

“I don’t know.” Dean smiles and kisses him. “You tell me.”


End file.
